2011: Steve Jobs left Apple strong

A day after Steve Jobs' death, while the family and colleagues of Apple's (AAPL) former CEO kept funeral details under tight wraps, tech analysts on Thursday issued largely upbeat forecasts for the company Jobs co-founded in 1976 and a publisher said it would move up the release date of an authorized biography of the tech icon.

As the Internet filled throughout the day with words and photos uploaded in memorial, many of them launched from the very devices that had made Apple so successful under Jobs' stewardship, Time Magazine announced it had stopped its presses for the first time in 30 years to devote 21 pages of coverage to Jobs, putting his picture on the cover for the eighth time.

Other publications followed suit, with BusinessWeek publishing a 64-page ad-free issue in Jobs' honor after initially planning to feature Texas Gov. Rick Perry on the cover. And across the blogosphere, from Wired to Google (GOOG) to BoingBoing, websites erected elaborate shrines to Jobs, inviting fans around the globe to weigh in with their own musings on the man.

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Jobs' death had set off a wave of Apple-related tweets, as Twitter reported record-breaking traffic. Social media monitoring firm SR7 estimated that Twitter received about 10,000 tweets per second as a result of the news, which Adweek described as the biggest online reaction to any event in recent history.

Separately, publisher Simon & Schuster announced it would move up for the second time the release date of Walter Isaacson's "Steve Jobs" from Nov. 21 to Oct. 24. Pre-sales of the book soared on the news of Jobs' death.

The New York Times late Thursday reported that Jobs received a steady stream of visitors in his final months, all wishing to bid farewell, not all of them being welcomed inside because Jobs was too tired to receive guests. Those who did spend time with him included a friend, physician Dean Ornish, who joined him for sushi in Palo Alto. Jobs also said goodbye to such colleagues as venture capitalist John Doerr and Disney Chief Executive Robert A. Iger.

Jobs also gave advice to his colleagues at Apple as they prepared to launch the iPhone 4S this week, the New York Times reported, and he spoke as well with his biographer, Isaacson. At one point, after starting a new drug regime, Jobs reportedly told friends that there was reason for hope.

On Thursday, Apple shares traded in a fairly tight range throughout the day, an indication to some investors and analysts that Jobs, who resigned as CEO in August but remained Apple's chairman of the board, had left a capable team in place to carry on his vision. In a note to clients that contained both a sense of condolence and fiscal insight, Barclays analyst Ben Reitzes wrote, "We believe Apple's innovation and product momentum can continue," stressing "how thoughtful (Jobs) was to carefully mentor and leave his company in the capable hands of new CEO Tim Cook and others."

At the end of trading, Apple shares closed at $377.37, down 88 cents or about a quarter of 1 percent.

To some observers, Jobs' death provided context for the apparent lack of energy at this week's unveiling of the new iPhone 4S. Popular blogger Robert Scoble publicly apologized to Cook in a post on Google+ for his criticism of Cook's performance and the underwhelming nature of the products he had introduced Tuesday. Scoble said in an interview Thursday that he still believes Apple pulled back from a more ambitious launch schedule, such as a mobile software partnership with Facebook, because of Jobs' impeding death.

Tuesday's iPhone event in San Francisco "was very un-Apple-like," Scoble said Thursday. "It just didn't seem like they took advantage of all the opportunities they had to explain why this phone was important to the whole of Apple. But now I understand; they were thinking about what was going on with Steve."

"If I was in that situation, I would have cut back to the minimum number of things to announce," Scoble added. "I would have to focus most of my team's energy on what was going to happen. So I give them a pass, and I feel guilty for saying (Cook) should have done better."

"It must have been pretty difficult for Tim and Phil and those guys to try to get up there, and try to be exuberant, knowing that the end was close. That may have been what we sensed," Bajarin said Thursday. "If you were sitting in the town hall, you didn't have that real level of excitement, what I would call the high energy that you sometimes get" at Apple events led by Jobs.

Cook and Apple marketing executive Phil Schiller on Tuesday felt "a sense of loss probably, the weight of the company really shifting, and then at the personal level they lost a great friend, or they were losing that."

But Bajarin said Apple made a strategic decision months ago that it made more sense to update internal components in a new version of the iPhone 4, rather than change to a whole new design for an iPhone 5. Jobs' failing health had no role in that decision, said Bajarin, who also said he doesn't believe any plans for a new Apple-Facebook partnership were pulled from Tuesday's announcement.

A source within Facebook also said the social network had no evidence that Apple had "gone dark" over the weekend, shutting off communication with Facebook as it prepared for Jobs' passing.